Frances Hodgkins

"In describing a town in Morocco, Tétouan: "The whiteness and pearliness of the town simply defies you-you can't get it pure and brilliant enough and the shadows drive one silly-you race after them , pause one frenzied moment to decide on a blue mauve yellow or green shadow-when up and over the wall and away and the wretched things gone for that day at least and you are gazing at a glaring blank wall and wondering why on earth you ever started to sketch it.""

"But au fond-deep in my work-I am steadfast and steady as a rock... My present work is consistent-I shall sink or swim by it-I think swim-."

"To her mother, 1921: "Don't let N Zealand wait to put up a memorial tablet to my memory—let her help me now whilst I am working at work that I hope will live after me.""

"It is one of the tragedies of leaving Home—New Zealand is too far away—it ceases to be real. New Zealanders like myself cannot help becoming de-nationalized—they have no country—it is sad—but true ... Art is like that—it absorbs your whole life and being. Few women can do it successfully. It requires enormous vitality. That is my conception of genius—vitality.""

"1912: "I was born in Dunedin; we were an English family in a Scottish settlement.""

"1895: "I am slowly settling down to an oldmaidship, and I have only one prominent idea and that is that nothing will interfere between me and my work.""

"To Dorothy Kate Richmond, 1903: "Come to Tetuan. Come—catch the next steamer, cancel all engagements, chuck the studio let everything go to the winds only come without a moment's delay and value for yourself all the dreams of beauty colour and sunshine...""

"Painting reduces me to tears and misery: peaks of ecstasy, depths of disillusion..."

"To her brother, August 1940: "My aspect of the family talent, or curse? has taken the form of a deep intellectual experience, a force which has given me no rest or peace but infinite joy and sometimes even rapture.""